Target posts dozens of corporate jobs despite eliminating 1,800 of them

A Target spokesperson confirmed to Modern Retail that the roles shown on its careers page remain open. The 800 roles cut as part of the restructuring have been removed, they said. The remaining roles are priority roles, or roles important for the company moving forward, for various reasons, according to the spokesperson.

This isn’t out of the norm for companies restructuring their workforce; Amazon too is still hiring for hundreds of corporate positions after laying off up to 30,000 people. Just this week, Amazon posted positions in supply chain and software development, among other fields. But Amazon continues to report solid revenue gains, revealing during its latest earnings report that net sales were up 13% year over year in the third quarter. Target, meanwhile, is looking to bring in fresh talent after several underwhelming quarters with declining or near-flat sales year over year.

Any team member who has separated has the ability to apply, per the terms of their separation package, the spokesperson said — but they would be considered on merit, like any other applicant would, rather than on any priority basis.

One Target employee who was laid off said on condition of anonymity that they had been looking at new opportunities at the company even before they were laid off. But now, they are weighing whether to continue doing so or to start fresh somewhere else.

“It doesn’t feel great being let go and then seeing new postings appear so soon after,” the former Target employee said. “I’ve always loved Target and truly believed in its culture and values. But now I’m questioning whether that feeling I was holding onto was genuine or just idealized. I feel shortchanged, in some ways, yet I’m also grateful for the experience because it’s forcing me to step back and look at things more honestly.”

This comes after some analysts questioned the company’s decision in August to promote an executive from within, COO Michael Fiddelke, to be its next CEO rather than an outsider.

“Because there have been performance issues, there are absolutely going to be specific, surgical, targeted job openings that they want to fill with new talent,” said Jeff Sward, founding partner of retail consultancy Merchandising Metrics, adding that some of the cuts may have been for the sake of cutting costs, but that Target may also be replacing low-performing workers. “The fact that they’re looking for fresh talent is good news and a signal that they’re putting one foot in front of another on new strategies.”

Mohamed Amer, founder and principal of Strategy Doctor and an adjunct strategic management professor at Pepperdine University, said that, while it’s good to have fresh talent and new thinking, he believes it’s more important to have that near the top of the org chart rather than the middle or bottom. It remains to be seen what new executives Fiddelke may look to bring on when he officially becomes CEO in February. “The top has not had any fresh thinking, fresh ideas, fresh perspectives in a long time,” he said.

Amer said he believes Target is trying to replace higher-cost institutional knowledge with lower-cost new hires. He said that if the company is cutting costs, it should say so directly.

“Own it; you know you’ve had [several poor quarters], … negative comps, and you just need to do something,” Amer said. “But what you’re doing is getting rid of the people and the expertise that can actually challenge and inform the decisions that you need to make.”

Fiddelke has said the company did not pursue the layoffs to cut costs, but rather to create a leaner organization that can make decisions faster. Amer disagrees with that premise.

“It’s the decisions they’re making versus the speed of decisions,” Amer said. “You can retrain people, you can reassign them — there are many ways that you can bring the talents you have and the resources you have, and ensure that they have what they need to be effective in a new type of setting. But I didn’t hear Target [saying] that the business is different.”

Amer said he believes the company should aim to return to being the place where people go for fashion-forward products at reasonable prices, which, in his view, is the value proposition it has delivered in the past. Fiddelke, for his part, has said that one of his priorities is for Target to “reclaim its merchandising authority.”

But if Target wants to return to being a place for fashion-forward products, “You don’t do that by cutting out a layer from there or eliminating some of the more senior positions,” Amer said. “You need to empower the merchants more, you need to talk about [being fashion-forward], and you need to say how AI is going to be infusing [into] the decision-making, supporting what they’re doing, enhancing the process. Those are the kind of statements that would resonate more with me and with others, and it would show that this group is thinking about changing the trajectory of Target.”